PDA: Past to the Future - The Intersections of Digitization, AI and the Digital Humanities

SCELC partners with peer library consortia around the country to form the Professional Development Alliance (PDA)! The PDA is dedicated to sharing our professional development opportunities with other alliance members. This new initiative multiplies the number and variety of online professional development opportunities available to the member libraries of each participating consortium. PDA webinars are freely available to librarians and staff at all SCELC Member and Affiliate Institutions.

Session Details:

Artificial Intelligence would not exist without digitization. Machine Learning requires massive amounts of training documents with more data creating higher intelligence. The Digital Humanities have reenergized historical research. Decades-long digitization programs continue to build a forever-growing vast digital corpus.

Bryan Benilous, Chief Consultant, Paperboy Digital Consulting, will discuss how digitization programs feed AI and how AI is being used to improve digitization. He will explore challenges with the existing ecosystem (silos, paywalls, biases, copyright, etc…). He will dig deeper into how Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is utilized and how it is being improved by AI. Various Digital Humanities resources - both Open Access and commercial - will be highlighted.

Attendees will be inspired to explore how their content might contribute to the broader digital corpus in support of the Digital Humanities.